Sir Walter Scott's short narratives, though never entirely neglected, have always been overshadowed by his achievement as a novelist whose strength lies rather in breadth of scope and a leisurely unfolding of the plot than in the virtues essential to the art of the short tale: concentration and conciseness. Such a view is corroborated by the author's own insight into his way of practising the storyteller's craft. Reflecting on his method of composition—or, rather, on the lack of it—he writes in the "Introductory Epistle" to The Fortunes of Nigel:

I have repeatedly laid down my future work to scale . . . and endeavoured to construct a story . . . But I think there is a demon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from my purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase; my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly¹.

Small wonder that a writer thus handicapped should be considered a stranger to a narrative form in which everything depends on careful planning and strict economy.

Even when Scott's short fiction did find whole-hearted appreciation—and some of it, above all "Wandering Willie's Tale" has been generally acclaimed—such success was still deemed singular and exceptional within the whole of his narrative work².

Such an evaluation appears to me unjustified and does not measure up to the real importance of this side of Scott's epic art. Surveyed in their entirety, his short tales—if we stretch this term beyond the limits of pure fiction and include the narrative elements of historical and antiquarian works like Tales of a Grandfather and Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft—make up a not inconspicuous part of his literary output. Some passages in these, especially in the latter compilation, as the story "Of an Eminent Scottish Lawyer deceased" (in Letter I), the legend of Thomas of Erceldoune (in Letter IV) or the tale of Bessie Dunlop (in Letter V), are well rounded tales that impress by their straightforwardness of movement and the aptness of effects sparingly used³.

Within the framework of the "Waverley Novels" from The Antiquary to the late Anne of Geierstein short tales have been included. Though differing in value as works of art—the closely knit "Wandering Willie's Tale" in Redgauntlet marking the culmination point against which others like the rather insipid "DonnerhugePs Narrative" in Anne of Geierstein form a decided anticlimax—all of them are well integrated into the larger work. They contribute to the novel's theme or plot by introducing a fresh perspective and extending the field of vision; they are functional; and none may be regarded as mere padding.—Even a slight affair such as "The Fortunes of Martin Waldock", a conventional tale of diablerie adapted from the German, strengthens the thematic strain of greed for money and its destructive influence on man, which is of a central importance in The Antiquary. It is perfectly placed within the larger context and accentuates the plot of this novel.

The much admired "Wandering Willie's Tale", besides being one of the best wrought and most impressive ghost stories, adds a dimension to the novel Redgauntlet by incorporating the spirit of a past, with its beliefs and superstitions still much alive, into the present, as well as by laying open new strata of meaning and furnishing a new key to the understanding of the novel's main action and figures. The tale has an especial bearing on Hugh Redgauntlet, for it furnishes a background to his person while placing him in a temporal field of reference. As a disclosure of his family history, it not only explains some of his motives but, by accentuating the harsh severity of his ancestors, gives greater fullness to a character portrait which has to be understood in its archaic traits and might, without the light thrown upon it through the fiddler's tale, have remained a merely one-dimensional pasteboard figure.

There is in Scott's novels one short narrative which, though not self-contained in a narrow sense but interlaced with the novel and merging into its further course, should nevertheless be viewed as an independent episode and a potential story in its own right: the Porteous Riots, forming the powerful introduction to Scott's greatest contribution to the art of fiction, The Heart of Mid-Lothian. The complex theme of this novel, embracing, as it does, the entangled problems of justice and equity, order and anarchy, independence of mind and obedience to the laws of traditions held sacred, is here bound into one knot and presented in a short sequence of dramatic scenes that are fully developed and boldly outlined. The first seven chapters of The Heart of Mid-Lothian are almost like a musical overture that sets the tune, creates the mood, and introduces the motifs out of which this novel with all its variety of scene and substance emerges.

So the uses made of short fictional forms in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and other "Waverley Novels" demonstrate that Scott, the novelist, could confer vital importance on the short tale as an integral element in the art of fiction as he developed it during the greater part of two decades.

In the course of his literary career Scott went beyond the practice of weaving units of short fiction into the texture of his novels. At the height of his financial troubles and at a time of great personal distress, in May 1826, soon after the death of his wife, feeling himself forced to turn his talent into ready money, he conceived the plan of a composition which he would be able to execute lightly and intermittently, so as to fill in the unavoidable intervals during the writing of his large-scale biography of Napoleon. The publication projected under these circumstances and characterized by the author as "a hors d'oeuvre" and "a kind of olla podrida, into which any species of narrative or discussion may be thrown"⁴ was published in 1827 as Chronicles of the Canongate, First Series. It is a work of creative richness notwithstanding the unpropitious circumstances out of which it was born.—The Chronicles open with an introduction of seven chapters which establish a fictitious narrator, a technique of development Scott had used before in the Tales of My Landlord. Much more than in that earlier sequence, the introduction forms a frame to the stories that follow: "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers". These two tales of differing length may be regarded, together with "Wandering Willie's Tale", as Scott's most significant contribution to the art of short fiction⁵.

The introductory chapters have in themselves a deeper motivation beyond the ostensible one of providing a fictitious basis for the telling of the stories. They gain a thematic unity of their own and grow into one autonomous tale. In them Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, the collector of the Chronicles, presents himself as a man who in his youth had squandered a fortune, then retrieved a small portion of it with the help of a legal friend and, after leaving Scotland, learned to lead a life of greater prudence in foreign parts. Returning home as an old man he seeks to recapture the past, but must experience to his sorrow that it is dead and gone. The futility of the attempt to call back a life which has been swallowed up by time is the true theme of Croftangry's personal history, a theme developed with the authenticity of an aging man's sense of a life approaching its end and presented in the first four chapters through two confrontations that are extraordinarily vivid. The remaining three chapters tell of Croftangry's resignation to this loss and his resolution to win back the past only in imagination, in the tales of old times which he collects and writes down.

Within the span of only 17,000 words the first four chapters condense the experience of one human being's lifetime under the aspect of the irretrievability of the past. If this sequence of chapters acquires the structural strength and the expressive density of a genuine short tale, it owes this above all to the placing and treatment of the two confrontations mentioned above in which the theme is fully realized.

The first occurs immediately after Croftangry's homecoming. He naturally wants to see his former benefactor in order to show him his gratitude. Meeting him after some difficulties, he finds the old lawyer on the brink of the grave, debilitated by a paralytic stroke and able to recognize his friend only for a brief moment of mental clarity. Croftangry has to depart, "agitated by a crowd of feelings, all of them painful"⁶.

The second confrontation with the past takes place when Croftangry revisits Glentanner, the parental estate he lost as a young man and which is now once again up for sale—an opportunity that stirs in him the desire to buy it back. The sad changes he has to face rush upon him at the first glimpse of the scene before him:

I came amid these reflections to the brow of a hill, from which I expected to see Glentanner; a modest-looking yet comfortable house, its walls covered with the most productive fruit-trees in that part of the country, and screened from the most stormy quarters of the horizon by a deep and ancient wood, which overhung the neighbouring hill. The house was gone; a great part of the wood was felled; and instead of the gentlemanlike mansion, shrouded and embosomed among its old hereditary trees, stood Castle Treddles, a huge lumping four-square pile of freestone, as bare as my nail, except for a paltry edging of decayed and lingering exotics, with an impoverished lawn stretched before it⁷.

His further experiences add to this. Finding the old mansion pulled down and its successor, an ugly cityfied structure already falling into decay, he looks for the former jointure-house where his mother used to live in her late years. This too is altered beyond recognition. It has been turned into an alehouse, and as the innkeeper is a former family servant of the Croftangrys known to him in his youth he enters, hoping to regain, at least in one human being, the past which has disappeared in the grounds and buildings. Yet here his disappointment reaches its full measure. The old woman makes only disparaging remarks about former times, and he is glad to escape without having been recognized by her.

Enriched by brief but elucidating observations on Croftangry's family and friends and the successors to his estate who failed as he had failed, these confrontation scenes express the essence of Croftangry's history with great force. They operate as centres of gravity round which the slender plot of the introductory story moves and from which it receives meaning⁸.

The two tales following Croftangry's history of his own life, "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers", are both tragedies which rise out of situations fundamental to Scott's historical imagination and are here transformed into a dramatic conflict between two levels of civilization of contradictory social and moral concepts. In "The Highland Widow" he takes up a subject matter familiar to his readers from Waverley and his later treatment of the Jacobite rebellions.—Elspath Mac Tavish, the widow of a Highland chieftain who lost his life at the hands of British soldiers after the suppression of the clans in 1746, still preserves the old ideals of Highland pride and independence in an utterly changed world. Her son Hamish, whom she believes to have brought up in his father's spirit and who does not lack courage and manliness, has nevertheless broken with the old traditions and freely accepts the conditions of the new age. He leaves home and—without his mother's knowledge—enlists in one of the recently founded Highland regiments of the British Army. Prior to being sent to serve abroad he returns to Elspath on a short leave. As he stands before her in the Highland garb of his military unit his mother takes this for a sign of his resolution to return to the law of the clan and to repudiate English power. Hamish, however, intends nothing of the kind. Being undeceived about what she must take for his cowardly apostasy she curbs her impulses of shame and anger and with all the strength of her passionate feelings and the rhetoric of her tongue pleads to win him back. Yet by none of her efforts can she move Hamish from what he believes to be right and appropriate for both himself and her. As a last resource, Elspath tries to keep her son by deception. On his last night she drugs his drink with a soporific so that he overstays his leave. Having learned from him that absence without leave may be punished with flogging and that he as a Highlander would never bear with such an ignominy, Elspath firmly believes that in this dilemma her son will renounce his allegiance to the English. But even now he remains true to his duty as a soldier and awaits the men approaching to arrest him. Only at the last moment is the mother able to goad the son to an almost instinctive reaction of defiance: he shoots the leader of the party, actually the one person prepared to do everything to alleviate his punishment.—After the bloody deed Hamish passively and stoically suffers the consequences: a court martial and the penalty of death.—Elspath lives on to old age in loneliness and black melancholy, a spectre of a bygone time.

The plot outlined here has all the elements to permeate the tale with the spirit of the tragic. Structurally, it is handled with sureness and a sense for dramatic immediacy. Yet for all this there is something wanting and something intruding to prevent the full realization of a tragic theme clearly conceived by the author. The prevailing tenseness of mood is counteracted by a looseness of texture that weakens the effect aimed at. In this story of 27.000 words (not counting the introductory first chapter) there occur at least three passages of a digressive kind not entirely justified by their context. Chapter three contains a reflection of the author's on Elspath's state of mind with regard to her son, certainly not at all irrelevant but overelaborate and, with its 680 words, too much for the situation in which it appears⁹.—The fifth chapter contains more digressions, of which one at least—the detailed information on Elspath's knowledge of drugs—is quite unnecessary¹⁰.—The other, presenting historical facts about the Highland regiments, goes far beyond what is required to clarify the situation¹¹.—Elspath's final speech, too, vital though it is to reveal her state of mind after the catastrophe, seems overexpanded and disproportionate¹².

These flaws in a tale of otherwise structural consistency point, as I believe, to an uncertainty in Scott himself about the formal demands of the short narrative, an uncertainty probably hinted at in his Journal of May 27, 1826, where he mentions the source for "The Highland Widow" and the use he made of it:

Mrs. Murray Keith's Tale of the Deserter, with her interview with the lad's mother, may be made most affecting, but will hardly endure expansion¹³.

These remarks indicate Scott's awareness of the danger of expansion in this particular tale; at the same time they imply that in the composition of it he lacked judgement in dealing with this problem.—Therefore a truly balanced assessment of "The Highland Widow" should stop short of the unconditional praise bestowed on it by Lilian Dickins and Sir George Douglas, but could well agree with the qualified appreciation of Lord David Cecil, who sees in it a story "that only a very great writer could have written", with a theme "on the grand scale", yet one that "falls short of perfection"¹⁴.

None of this weakness appears in the second tale of the Chronicles, "The Two Drovers". Drawing, as he had done in "The Highland Widow", on his intimate understanding of Scottish character and customs and heightening an entanglement of circumstance and human relationship into a stern tragedy of inevitability, this tale differs in tone and atmosphere and attains a sureness of touch as well as a balance of parts lacking in the preceding work.—Perhaps this difference may be explained by the fact that in "The Two Drovers" Scott moves in a man's world with almost no woman intruding. Though the charge brought against him that he could not draw women is refuted by one of his most successful creations, Jeanie Deans, he was never quite at home with women of a highly emotional nature; and he had to deal with such a one in "The Highland Widow". The principal characters in "The Two Drovers", on the other hand, are men of steadiness and self-restraint.

The story tells of the friendship between two cattle-drovers, one of them, Robin Oig, a Highlander, the other, Harry Wakefield, an Englishman from Yorkshire. Differing in temper and not without national prejudices, the two have nevertheless become staunch friends, helping each other in the common pursuit of leading their large droves of cattle from Perthshire to the markets in England. While on their way through Cumberland an altercation rises between them over some grazing land allotted to each by a mistake for which neither is responsible. But the Yorkshireman wrongly suspects his friend to have played a trick on him. At night when they meet again at an alehouse Wakefield, incited by the party gathered there, who would gladly see a Scotsman put to shame by an Englishman, challenges Robin to settle the dispute with their fists. In spite of the latter's pointing out that he as a Highlander is no pugilist and would fight only with a bare blade and though Wakefield has to admit that the misunderstanding is cleared up and there remains no serious reason for fighting, he insists on the contest, more or less to show off in front of the company. In the short fight that ensues Robin is struck down by the athletic Yorkshireman who, immediately after, offers the hand of friendship to his comrade. The Highlander however leaves the room deeply hurt. He runs back many miles to the resting-place of another drover with whom he had left his Highland dirk for the period of their journey. Having retrieved the weapon he returns straight to the alehouse and in front of the people still assembled there plunges the dirk into his unsuspecting friend's breast.—His code of honour left him no other way of regaining his dignity which had been insulted in public.—After the deed he gives himself up to an officer of the law, pays homage to the friend killed by his hand, and in his last words accepts the penalty of death with firmness and a sense of justice restored: "I give a life for the life I took, and what can I do more¹⁵?" The rare excellence of this story lies—as it is bound to—in the fullness and truth of the theme as well as in the peculiarity of its expression, or, rather, in a theme realized only in and by the manner in which it is expressed. It discloses a penetrating insight into human nature; in all the simplicity of its unilinear course it shows man's power for good, for humanizing life by tolerance and friendship, and at the same time his inability to transgress the limitations which circumstances of environment, tradition and history have set around him. In doing this it enters the sphere of great tragedy.

Scott's art in expressing his theme, the structural and stylistic execution of "The Two Drovers" is, in contrast to the former tale, distinguished by great concentration. The entire story comprises scarcely more than 12,000 words which is less than half the length of "The Highland Widow". Within this narrow compass a wealth of background matter, necessary for the development of the theme, is included.—The masterful construction can be clearly seen in the brief first chapter, which presents the exposition of the drama. The opening situation—the gathering of the cattle in Perthshire, the drovers' farewell to their friends and neighbours—is given with a few strokes that vividly conjure up the scene. Within it, the importance and dignity of a drover's calling (his responsibility, his need for patience and circumspection in the long journey to the South) is strongly impressed on the reader, thus giving weight and size to the figures of the two men.—But far more is accomplished in these few pages. At the Highlander's leave-taking an old woman with the gift of prophecy warns him against his expedition, foreseeing that he will shed blood with his dirk. In this simple way—quite appropriate to the time and place—a mood of foreboding, of an impending fate, is introduced, which contributes much to the central effect of the story. Forced by the situation to give heed to the warning, Robin leaves his dirk with another Scottish drover who is about to follow him at a short distance. The brief conversation with this man is of a considerable significance. This other drover, a man from the Lowlands, accepts the charge, but cannot refrain from some sarcastic remarks on the Highlander's uncouth weapon against which he praises the Lowlander's broadsword and cudgel. Robin, though displeased, keeps his patience, giving way to his vexation only in a few words in Gaelic, which the other cannot understand.—A motive is struck in this little episode which points at and enhances the central event of the story, the sudden destruction of a friendship seemingly consolidated by years of good fellowship.

The end of "The Two Drovers" deserves notice too. There is a change from the story-teller's tale to a documentary report, the judge's summing-up of Robin's trial. This confers a new gravity on the winding-up of the narrative and effectively widens the perspective, a feature of the tale which could not have been attained through the medium of the story-teller's point of view. Apart from that, the final evaluation of Robin Oig by the person who has to pronounce judgement on him according to human law, adds to the dignity of the protagonist and gives a consummation to the tale which could not have been reached by other means.

A careful consideration of "The Two Drovers" is bound to reveal this story as a perfect example of short fiction; it may well be counted among the very best tales in English literature. In this little work as well as in the more generally accepted "Wandering Willie's Tale"—to which should be added at least some of his other writings in this vein—Scott has indeed established himself as a master in the art of the short-narrative¹⁶.

If reading these stories is a reward in itself, it can also serve another purpose for the modern reader. In our preoccupation with formal aspects and values we often tend to find fault with Scott's novels, their looseness of construction, their deficient planning, their tendency to anti-quarian digression. His short tales show few of these "drawbacks". Indeed at their best they accomplish a pure concentration without renouncing all the substantial values that have made Scott one of the leading novelists of world literature: the genuineness of his historical imagination, the wide scope of his creative vision of the human scene, the truth of his insight into the workings of the human mind. An appreciation of his short tales is an excellent approach to the rich and varied world of his novels.

Let us once more turn back to our initial observation that Scott, from the way in which he practised the story-teller's craft as a novelist and from his own estimate of himself as a writer, seemed but indifferently equipped for reaching perfection in the field of short narrative prose. If we have nevertheless seen him excel in this domain one of the reasons for his success may be found in his literary education, which was based on an intimate knowledge of short literary forms, Scottish balladry and the folk tale of his country. Notwithstanding other formative influences—the eighteenth century novel and Italian epic poetry prominent among them—the early providers of his youthful imagination remained potent throughout his life.—Many of his short narratives grew out of folk tales. The two of them treated by us in some detail, "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers", in theme and motivation are closely connected with the popular ballad.—In his tales Sir Walter Scott repaid the manifold gifts yielded him by the wide resources of vernacular poetry and the oral traditions of his native Scotland.

Notes

¹ "Waverley Novels", vol. 14, p. xliv. Quotations from Scott's fiction refer to the "Large Type Border Edition" of the "Waverley Novels", ed. by Andrew Lang (London 1901).

² The most perceptive appreciation of Scott's short narratives is contained in Lord David Cecil's introduction to his edition: Scott, Sir Walter: Short Stories (London 1934). His selection embraces practically all the stories not included in the novels; of those forming part of the novels only the famous "Wandering Willie's Tale" is reprinted.

³ Cf. Scott, Sir Walter: Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft(London 1830), pp. 26-33, 132-136, 146-153.

⁴ Sir Walter Scott's Journal, May 27, 1826, May 28, 1826.

⁵ A further story, "The Surgeon's Daughter", rather a short novel than a tale, which originally followed the two others, was later separated from them by the author and transferred to a second part of the "First Series". In 1828 Scott published Chronicles of the Canongate, Second Series, where he abandoned the form of short fiction altogether and returned to the full length novel. The Fair Maid of Perth of which this "Second Series" consists, is his last great achievement in the fie: "My Aunt Margaret's Mirror" and "The Tapestried Chamber", both published in The Keepsake for 1828; the third, "Death of the Laird's Jock" remained a draft. Though of slight importance, they confirm Scott's competence in dealing with short narrative prose.